President Bush yesterday issued a formal White House proclamation declaring January 21 to be “National Sanctity of Human Life Day, 2007.”

National Sanctity of Human Life Day helps foster a culture of life and reinforces our commitment to building a compassionate society that respects the value of every human being. …

One of our society’s challenges today is to harness the power of science to ease human suffering without sanctioning practices that violate the dignity of human life. With the right policies, we can continue to achieve scientific progress while living up to our ethical and moral responsibilities.

On the very same day, Story Landis, the National Institutes of Health official overseeing President Bush’s restrictive embryonic stem cell policy, suggested that Bush’s approach is delaying life-saving cures in “an unusually blunt assessment for an executive branch official.”